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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Key Facts

Quiz

Study Questions

1.

Discuss the
relationship between the scarlet letter and Hester’s identity. Why
does she repeatedly refuse to stop wearing the letter? What is the
difference between the identity she creates for herself and the
identity society assigns to her?

For Hester, to remove the scarlet letter
would be to acknowledge the power it has in determining who she
is. The letter would prove to have successfully restricted her if
she were to become a different person in its absence. Hester chooses
to continue to wear the letter because she is determined to transform
its meaning through her actions and her own self-perception—she
wants to be the one who controls its meaning. Society tries to reclaim
the letter’s symbolism by deciding that the “A” stands for “Able,”
but Hester resists this interpretation. The letter symbolizes her
own past deed and her own past decisions, and she is the one who
will determine the meaning of those events. Upon her return from
Europe at the novel’s end, Hester has gained control over both her
personal and her public identities. She has made herself into a
symbol of feminine repression and charitable ideals, and she stands
as a self-appointed reminder of the evils society can commit.

2.

In what
ways could The Scarlet Letter be read as a commentary
on the era of American history it describes? How does Hawthorne’s
portrayal of Europe enter into this commentary? Could the book also
be seen as embodying some of the aspects it attributes to the nation
in which it was written?

Typically, America is conceptualized as a
place of freedom, where a person’s opportunities are limited only
by his or her ambition and ability—and not by his or her social
status, race, gender, or other circumstances of birth. In the Puritan
society portrayed in the novel, however, this is not the case. In
fact, it is Europe, not America, that the book presents as a place
of potential. There, anonymity can protect an individual and allow
him or her to assume a new identity. This unexpected inversion leads
the characters and the reader to question the principles of freedom
and opportunity usually identified with America. Hester’s experiences
suggest that this country is founded on the ideals of repression
and confinement. Additionally, the narrator’s own experiences, coming
approximately two hundred years after Hester’s, confirm those of
his protagonist. His fellow customs officers owe their jobs to patronage
and family connections, not to merit, and he has acquired his own
position through political allies. Thus, the customhouse is portrayed
as an institution that embodies many of the principles that America supposedly
opposes.

Much of the social hypocrisy presented in the book stems
from America’s newness. Insecure in its social order, the new society
is trying to distance itself from its Anglican origins yet, at the
same time, reassure itself of its legitimacy and dignity. It is
a difficult task to “define” oneself as a land of self-defining
individuals. But it is this project of defining America that Hawthorne
himself partially undertakes in his novel. He aims to write a text
that both embodies and describes “Americanness.”

3.

This novel
makes extensive use of symbols. Discuss the difference between the
Puritans’ use of symbols (the meteor, for example) and the way that
the narrator makes use of symbols. Do both have religious implications?
Do symbols foreshadow events or simply comment on them after the
fact? How do they help the characters understand their lives, and
how do they help the reader understand Hawthorne’s book?

The Puritans in this book are constantly
seeking out natural symbols, which they claim are messages from
God. Yet these characters are not willing to accept any revelation
at face value. They interpret the symbols only in ways that confirm
their own preformulated ideas or opinions. The meteor that streaks
the sky as Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold in Chapter 12 is a
good example of this phenomenon. To Dimmesdale and to the townspeople,
the “A” that the meteor traces in the sky represents whatever notion
already preoccupies them. To the minister, the meteor exposes his
sin, while to the townspeople it confirms that the colony’s former
governor, who has just died, has gone to heaven and been made an
angel.

For the narrator, on the other hand, symbols function
to complicate reality rather than to confirm one’s perception of
it. The governor’s garden, which Hester and Pearl see in Chapter 7,
illustrates his tactic quite well. The narrator does not describe
the garden in a way that reinforces the image of luxury and power
that is present in his description of the rest of the governor’s
house. Rather, he writes that the garden, which was originally planted
to look like an ornamental garden in the English style, is now full
of weeds, thorns, and vegetables. The garden seems to contradict
much of what the reader has been told about the governor’s power
and importance, and it suggests to us that the governor is an unfit
caretaker, for people as well as for flowers. The absence of any
flowers other than the thorny roses also hints that ideals are often
accompanied by evil and pain. Confronted by the ambiguous symbol
of the garden, we begin to look for other inconsistencies and for
other examples of decay and disrepair in Puritan society.

Suggested Essay Topics

1. Discuss the function of physical
setting in The Scarlet Letter. What is the relationship
between the book’s events and the locations in which these events
take place? Do things happen in the forest that could not happen
in the town? What about time of day? Does night bring with it a
set of rules that differs from those of the daytime?

2. Is The Scarlet Letter a
protofeminist novel? Had Hester not been a woman, would she have
received the same punishment? When Hester undertakes to protect
other women from gender-based persecution, can we interpret her actions
as pointing to a larger political statement in the text as a whole?

3. Describe Chillingworth’s “revenge.”
Why does he choose to torture Dimmesdale and Hester when he could
simply reveal that he is Hester’s husband? What does this imply
about justice? About evil?

4. Discuss the function of the
past in this novel. The narrator tells a two-hundred-year-old story
that is taken from a hundred-year-old manuscript. Why does Hawthorne
use a framing story for this novel rather than simply telling the story?
Why are the events set in such distant history?

5. Children play a variety of
roles in this novel. Pearl is both a blessing and a curse to Hester,
and she seems at times to serve as Hester’s conscience. The town
children, on the other hand, are cruel and brutally honest about
their opinion of Hester and Pearl. Why are children presented as
more perceptive and more honest than adults? How do children differ
from adults in their potential for expressing these perceptions?

6. Native Americans make a few
brief and mysterious appearances in this novel. What role do they
play? In what ways might their presence contribute to the furthering
of the book’s central themes?

SparkNotes is the best! "The Scarlet Letter" has the most confusing Olde English I think I've ever had to muddle through. Thankfully, SparkNotes broke it down for me and explained what's going on when, 'cause you just can't understand with all the beating around the bush!

This SparkNote was amazingly easy to understand, I just wish that someone would rewrite the book with modern English. But anyway, the quizzes are SUPER (Let me stress that super) helpful. Since the chapter summaries are so well written, I was actually able to come to... Read more→